I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come.
I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the death of Archie Roach, the Gunditjmara and Bundjalung elder and iconic singer and songwriter, at the age of just 66. I didn't know him personally either although I heard him sing several times and read his moving memoir, Tell Me Why.
Archie was born in Victoria in 1956, the youngest of a big family. In 1958 he and his siblings were forcibly removed from their parent's home in Framlingham Mission and made wards of the State. He suffered two abusive foster placements before finally ending up with the Cox family in Melbourne, a family he always spoke about with fondness. He never saw either of his parents again. He and his foster parents were told his family had been killed in a house fire.
One day, when he was 14, a letter arrived at his school from his older sister, telling him of the death of their mother. This letter turned his world on its head and set him on a quest to find his family. All he had was his sister's name and Sydney address on the back of the envelope and by the time he got there she was no longer there. He joined the people living on Sydney's streets and eventually, through living long enough with other Aboriginal people, reunited with his surviving siblings.
Why have I placed Archie Roach beside Queen Elizabeth in this way? Well, it seems to me that these two lives belong together.
Queen Elizabeth was in many ways an admirable woman. She was highly intelligent, had a great sense of humour, and had a sense of duty that few could match. She also appeared to have a genuine interest in people and a way of making them feel special. She was able, at times of crisis, to show great compassion.
But along with that is this other life. Archie Roach was born four years into Elizabeth's reign and died just before its end. The difference in their lifespans is the difference between a life of privilege and one of trauma. He was also highly intelligent, hard working, had a great sense of humour, a strong sense of compassion and a way of making others feel special. He was no less worthy of a long life.
Yet there is more to it than that. The laws by which the State of Victoria was able to shatter the Roach family, and the various States to shatter thousands more in the same way, were enacted in her name and signed into law by her representatives, the governors of the various States.
Of course she didn't personally carry out any of these child abductions, which were conducted by police and public servants. Nor did she personally make the laws. The Westminster system of democracy assigns the monarch and her or his representatives a purely ceremonial role. It retains the fiction that she makes the laws but in fact she is merely a figurehead. If she, or her father or grandfather or their representatives, had refused assent to any of these laws it would have created a constitutional crisis.
But then, constitutional crises are not necessarily a bad thing. A crisis that arose from a key player in that system of government questioning its right to abduct children could only be a step forward. It could have brought on much sooner the discussion about racial justice, about dispossession and reparation, about righting the wrongs of colonisation. As it was, these were swept under the carpet.
Two questions occur to me. Did she know about this practice? And what did she do in response?
One possibility is that she was unaware. After all, Australia is a long way from any of her palaces and even many Australians were unaware of it for decades. It was our nation's dirty little secret. Perhaps she could have been forgiven for not knowing. But if this was the case it implies a level of ignorance and disinterest sharply at odds with the picture of the 'grandmother of the nation' we are hearing. It implies a woman who could not see beyond the walls of her castle, who accepted the carefully curated Australia she was shown on her visits as the real thing. Perhaps she did not care to look too deeply, or too far.
This might just have washed in the 1950s when the Roach children were abducted. By the end of the 1980s it becomes impossible. If she loved Australia, as our journalists have been insisting over the past week, then the stories must have reached her ears. Indeed, she could not have avoided knowing some things. From at least the 1970s onwards all her visits were accompanied by protests from first nations people. In the late 1990s she received a delegation of Aboriginal leaders that included Lowitja O'Donoghue, another stolen child. The notion that she simply did not know evaporates before the number of times she would have been told.
So what did she do? Those who took part in that 1990s delegation report that she listened to them with interest and asked intelligent questions. But she certainly said nothing publicly of note, beyond generic statements about the importance of respecting all the cultures of her realm. Even when Kevin Rudd delivered his official apology to the stolen children in 2008 there is no record of any corresponding apology from the Queen. It is almost as if what was done in her name was no concern of hers.
Was she privately horrified? Did this story cause her to reflect on her own legacy and position? Perhaps so, but none of this cracked the facade. Her public face remained neutral. Perhaps she raised the issue in her meetings with Bob Hawke, who promised a treaty and then reneged, or John Howard, who banged the lectern as he refused an apology to the turned backs of Aboriginal leaders. Perhaps she sent Kevin Rudd a congratulatory telegram. If so, we have never heard about them. As far as we can tell, whatever her private feelings she said and did nothing. None of her family's massive stolen wealth was returned to Australia's first nations. They had to fight long and hard even to have their ancestors' remains returned for a proper burial. If she is indeed the grandmother of our nation she is a surprisingly negligent one.
So, the third possibility, one that can barely be spoken in the current climate of adulation, is that in fact she supported this policy. She well understood that her multiple palaces, billions in wealth, and her global reach were the result of the dispossession of peoples around the globe, and she was grateful for that dispossession. Perhaps she believed, as her colonial governments would have told her, that Aboriginal parents were unable to give their children a good life and they were better off in middle class white foster homes. Perhaps she agreed with John Howard that the benefits of colonialism outweighed the harms and Aboriginal people should be thanking her, not seeking reparations. I would not like to think this was the case, but I have no evidence to disprove it.
So here we are, three pictures of Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps she was ignorant, deceived by her minders and making no effort to learn. Perhaps she was passive, knowing about grave abuses but remaining silent and doing nothing. Perhaps she was actively complicit, privately cheering on the oppressors and deniers while retaining a conciliatory, neutral public façade. None of these stories matches the gushing adulation we hear day after day as we are told every detail of her extended memorial and watch footage of the eight kilometre queue lining up for their minute beside her coffin.
I can't find any record of Queen Elizabeth ever meeting Archie Roach. I don't know of she ever heard 'Took the Children Away' - I understand she favoured classical music. Still, I like to think there will be a chance for them to meet now. In God's upside down kingdom their roles will be reversed. Elizabeth will bow before Archie and call him 'Sir'. Perhaps in the light of God's knowledge, moral as well as factual, she will apologise tearfully for her own failings and those of her forebears. He will have the right, according to strict justice, to take her children and grandchildren from her.
But I like to think he will not - that there in the presence of God's Son he will accept her heart-felt apology and at last they will both be able to rest in peace.
Comments